Ezra Klein: ‘Obama, based on his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s’

Take health-care reform. The individual mandate was developed by a group of conservative economists in the early 90s. Mark Pauly, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was one of them. "We were concerned about the specter of single-payer insurance," he told me recently. The conservative Heritage Foundation soon had an individual-mandate plan of its own, and when President Bill Clinton endorsed an employer mandate in his health-care proposal, both major Republican alternatives centered on an individual mandate. By 1995, more than 20 Senate Republicans -- including Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar, and a few others still in office -- had signed one individual mandate bill or another. The story on cap-and-trade -- which conservatives now like to call "cap and tax" -- is much the same. Back then, the concern was sulfur dioxide, the culpri...